Discover storytelling that will entertain and inspire—and likely suck the air out of the room as you turn to the next page...
Unfiltered.
Unflinching.
Unforgettable.
Nadia Bruce-Rawlings takes us from childhood scenes in Egypt, with servants and vacations on Cyprus, to the most sordid of L.A. streets, from parties in Cannes and karaoke in Tokyo to stealing batteries and pregnancy tests to support her crack habit and sharing day-care motherhood with strippers. She is fearless in presenting both worlds and sketching the twilight zone between them, showing us that the struggles of adolescence in a dysfunctional family in the Middle East have their counterpart in the daily struggles of an addict, equally a foreigner in the surface world of respectability in any American city. Turning horror to hope, as we have seen in so many tales that have held our attention through the ages, can give even the most sordid journey a golden destination, and it does so here.
-Rob Simbek
Meet the Author
Nadia Bruce-Rawlings
The kind of writer who doesn’t flinch.
That’s the first thing you need to know about Nadia Bruce-Rawlings. While other literary voices tiptoe around trauma with metaphor and distance, she plunges both hands into the wreckage of memory and pulls out something raw, pulsing, and uncomfortably real. This is cathartic realism at its most unflinching—fiction that doesn’t just borrow from lived experience but bleeds it onto the page.
Her early years read like a novel no editor would believe: a nomadic childhood bouncing between continents, an adolescence steeped in chaos, and eventually, the neon-soaked descent into Los Angeles’ film industry underbelly. Drugs. Alcohol. The kind of abusive relationships that leave scars the eye can’t see. By the time she clawed her way into recovery, Bruce-Rawlings had accumulated enough material for a dozen lifetimes of fiction—and the nerve to write it without apology.
Today, she’s dug into the Nashville outskirts with her husband and a reasonably patient dog, carving out stolen hours to conjure prose with purpose in her lake-adjacent community.
The accolades speak for themselves. Glimmer Train—arguably the most respected short-fiction contest in America—named both “Fire” and “Scars” as finalists, an impressive double recognition that marked her as a writer to watch. Her debut anthology, SCARS (Punk Hostage Press, 2014), arrived like a punch to the sternum—stark, visceral, and unapologetically Nadia. Six years later, DRIVING IN THE RAIN (2020) proved the first collection wasn’t a fluke. Bluestem Magazine featured her story “Peace Accord” in their Fall 2018 edition, cementing her reputation for narratives that linger long after the final sentence.
In 2017, Bruce-Rawlings co-wrote a song with fellow author, Lois Berg, for feature in “Battered But Not Broken” — a theatrical event they created and in which they also starred. Debuting at The Darkhorse Theatre, the show served as a fundraiser for battered women and earned notable recognition as a Critic’s Pick in the Nashville Scene.
As if authoring weren’t enough, Bruce-Rawlings has also established herself as an editor whose instincts other writers trust. Several books shaped by her editorial eye now populate Amazon and other retailers.
Nadia Bruce-Rawlings’ writing makes you grateful you survived—and she—survived, while proving not every story has to have a redemption arc or tidy ending. Her books inspire and encourage readers to see what happens when you stop pretending the scars aren’t there—and start using them as proof you’re still standing.
